Books shelved under “Space Opera”

It feels like just yesterday that Ann Leckie took the science fiction scene by storm with Ancillary Justice. I enjoyed her debut novel for what it was—a ripping good story set in a universe with just enough originality to make it fun and familiarity to make it conceivable. Now, suddenly, here we are at the conclusion of the trilogy with Ancillary Mercy. I'm all a-tingle!

Breq has come a long way since she…

Unlike the majority of the other reviews on Goodreads for this book, I did not receive this as a NetGalley preview, so I did read 400 pages of adventure following the Tenth Doctor and the mysterious adversary the Advocate. As with my recent experience with a tie-in novel, I don’t ordinarily go for tie-in graphic novels. This was, again, a Christmas present.

I enjoyed Winter’s Dawn, Season’s End more than Engines of War. Maybe…

Let’s begin with a disclaimer that I read this because my dad gave it to me as a Christmas gift. I don’t, generally, read media tie-in novels—or comics. Despite my abiding desire to continue Buffy or Farscape, I just can’t do it. I read—and greatly enjoyed—many of the Star Trek novels when I was a child. Nevertheless, I find that the actors bring something to their portrayal of a character that not even the…

Does every science-fiction writer have to write a Big Dumb Object novel? (TVTropes) Is it some kind of rite of passage? That’s basically what Spindrift is, or at least what it starts out as. Later it becomes a novel about first contact and an attempt to evoke that kind of humble, “we are not alone” sensation other such stories play with. Perhaps what sets it apart from similar novels is Steele’s smart decision to set…

Ancillary Sword picks up almost immediately after Ancillary Justice ends. Breq, kind of forcibly adopted into the house of tyrant Anander Mianaai, is sent by said tyrant to Athoek Station. Anander wants Breq to look for signs of the other Anander’s influence in the system; Breq just wants to protect the surviving family member of a lieutenant she once knew when she was Justice of Toren.

The specifics aren’t really important here, and you…

So, I enjoyed The Warrior’s Apprentice, and The Mountains of Mourning made me cry. How I would react to The Vor Game was anyone’s guess, but I knew that this last story in the Young Miles omnibus would not disappoint me.

Indeed, with this book, Lois McMaster Bujold hits it out of the park. I totally get why this won the Hugo Award in 1991. It is bold and brash but has a deeper…

The Last Colony was the triumphant conclusion to the trilogy of John Perry and Jane Sagan vs. the Universe. Reluctant leaders of the new Roanoke colony, John and Jane manage to stave off a couple of deadly attacks and do an end-run around the Colonial Union brinksmanship that would otherwise have proved deadly for the colony in the long term. And they do this all while being the adoptive parents of a sixteen-year-old who is…

So I’m on a relativistic shuttle, waiting for you…. I never found anybody else and I don’t want anybody else. I don’t care whether you’re ninety years old or thirty. If I can’t be your lover, I’ll be your nurse.

Hey kids, you know how people keep using that word allegory, and you’re never really sure what they mean, and they probably aren’t even sure what they mean?

This. This is an allegory.

If…

Miles Vorkosigan has a mixed bag. On one hand, he’s the Barrayaran heir to a title. He has parents who care about him and have given him a first-class education. When he travels off-world to Beta Colony, he gets sweet diplomatic immunity and a tough bodyguard. Then again, the bodyguard is there in case someone tries to kill him. That’s the other hand. Exposure to a toxin in the womb has left Miles with weakened,…

Centuries after the events of The Fall of Hyperion, and three and a half years after I read that book, Endymion takes place and I read it. I had actually forgotten that there was a book between this one and Hyperion; I described this as the second book in a series when friends asked me what I was reading. Oops! And it has been so long since I read the first two that…

It has been ages since I read The Ghost Brigade and over a year since I read The Human Division, which chronologically takes place after the events in The Last Colony but doesn’t spoil a lot of it. I guess it’s a testament to my terrible memory (and the reason why I write these reviews) that I remembered almost nothing about either books when I started reading this one. I couldn’t really recall who…

Yes, it’s another review of Saga, this time of Volume Three, the last of three volumes I bought for a friend. It’s hard to think of original things to say, having read and reviewed the first two in quick succession. So let’s look at the journey Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples are taking us on after nearly twenty issues of this incredibly story.

I’m impressed at the complexity of the supporting cast. Kiara,…

Now, I am a lucky and spoiled person who is reading Saga collected in volumes, rather than reading each issue as it is released like a chump—er, I mean, true fan. I guess it’s comparable to binge-watching a show after the entire season has been released rather than watching it week-by-week. In the end, you get to the same place. But the experience is totally different.

Saga, Volume Two raises the stakes after Volume One…

Saga first came onto my radar last year when it was nominated for a Hugo Award. (Volume Two was nominated this year!) In fact, I’m pretty sure that it was included in the Voters Packet.

I didn’t read it.

I don’t read many graphic novels. I understand why people like them, and part of me wishes I read more—but obviously that’s not a big enough part, or else I actually would. Simply put, I am…

This book landed on my to-read list in 2009, and I remembered nothing about it when I finally tracked it down at my library. (For a while, I actually owned a used copy in the UK, but it went missing. Very mysterious. I suspect the AIs had something to do with it.) As I started reading Seeds of Earth, I wanted to dislike it. I wanted to find faults with it. Disappointingly that didn’t…

So … I don’t think I’d go as far as The New York Times Book Review does in praising this book. According to the blurb on the back of my edition, “it invites the reader to collaborate in the process of creation, in a way that few novels do”. Umm … yeah. Sure. Someone has been critiquing literature a little too long. But the blurb is right about one thing: Stars in My Pocket Like…

Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya short fiction continues to be a universe that I enjoy reading but don’t hanker to return to very often. “The Waiting Stars” continues her heavily figurative style of writing, something that doesn’t always work for me. So my feelings about this story are ambivalent: I want to like it, but I also have to admit it doesn’t appeal to my personal aesthetics.

Lan Nhen and her cousin Cuc are on a…

The liminal space between science fiction and fantasy is one of the most fertile confluences of genre. Hard science fiction kind of wraps around on itself; when your technology becomes indistinguishable from magic, suddenly you’ve entered a world of nanotechnological fantasy. “The Bees Her Heart, the Hive Her Belly” echoes these sentiments. Benjanun Sriduangkaew, a nominee for this year’s John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, plays in a world where technology has advanced…

Like some of the other entries in this anthology, Enemy Mine feels like a prototype that defines the mould for an entire subgenre of science fiction. In this case, Barry Longyear uses the plight of two individuals to highlight the folly of the blind hatred taught to them by their respective species. With a human and a Drac soldier stranded together on an inhospitable world in the middle of a war, they must work together…

Can you imagine being in two places at once? It’s a common image to conjure, but actually imagine it. Weird, huh?

Now try imagining being two people in two places at once. Or two people, in the same place. That’s even harder, and even weirder. But it’s exactly what Ann Leckie asks of us in Ancillary Justice, a book about a person who was once and is still but isn’t any more a ship, …